CLARION Issue 2

THE CHICAGO FOODCULTURA CLARION Issue 2 FRUITS OF ANTH 25320 2-3 A Tale of Two Tapas Bars: El Interna- cional and Café Ba-Ba-Reeba! at the Dawn of Small Plates Ameri- ca, el amanecer de las tapas 4 A Bowl of Nostalgia, or Discri- mination: Korean-style Chinese Food in Chicago's Koreatown 5 La Chaparrita, ANGELINA, La Dama Blanca, and César the TAquero 6-7 Chicago Hot Dog Places: A Fa- ding Art 8-9 Blood Buttons: A stockyards fashion trend revi- val 9 THE GIFT OF Raccoon 10 TABLE SCRAPS 11 Love Food in the Time of Covid-19 11-12 Illustration by Raina Wellman EDITORIAL Oyez, oyez! After nary a three month hiatus, the Chi- of steaming trashcans and flapping newspapers.” cago Foodcultura Clarion rings out again. This time Good existentialist that she was, to de Beauvoir, for its penultimate number, to be distributed once this seemed “refreshing after the heavy odour of more across Chicagoland in a 2700 copy print run as dollars in the big hotels and elegant restaurants, an insert in the Reader. Not that any of the authors which I found hard to take.” Years later, de Beau- or editors of issue number one ever managed to get voir (of all people!) wrote Algren that she’d even a hold of a properly inserted copy! So count yourself cook and clean for him. Imagine that! The Man lucky if you did, or could make a sandwich wrapper with the Golden Arm and The Second Sex—two out of it, as per our instructions. But now watch out books rarely mentioned in one sentence (shouldn’t for the new one in your neighborhood Reader box! they?)—appeared two years later. For those who missed the first issue, let me explain. Such are the known unknowns, as former Secre- The Chicago Foodcultura Clarion grew out of a col- tary of State Donald Rumsfeld once so memora- laboration between the Barcelona/Miami-based pio- bly put it. But, we can have a guess as to that din- neer of food art Antoni Miralda and the University ner in the winter of 1947. In part this is so because of Chicago anthropologist Stephan Palmié. Under before Algren attained national and international the generous auspices of a Mellon Foundation grant fame as a writer (Hemingway rightly called him awarded to them by the University of Chicago’s the American Dostojevski), this grandson of a Richard and Mary Gray Center for Art and Inquiry, contrarian Swedish immigrant who converted to Miralda and Palmié taught an experimental course orthodox Judaism in New York and (much to the entitled “Foodcultura: The Art and Anthropology of chagrin of his family) took to itinerant prophecy Food and Cuisine” in the fall of 2019. Together, the soon after, earned his first spurs in the context of two of us sent our students out on ethnographic mis- the New Deal WPA Federal Writers Project. From sions into Chicago’s wonderfully variegated food its inception under the New Deal in 1935 to its worlds. A number of their projects will be presented shameful destruction by the House Committee on in this issue of the Clarion. But before editorializing Un-American Activities in 1943, the Federal Writ- about the cornucopia of Chicago food writing and imaging that awaits you in ers Project employed thousands of writers, artists, and professionals who had this issue, gentle reader, let me tell you a story. It is about romance, twentieth lost their jobs in the publishing industry. Next to Algren, who joined the FWP century intellectual history, and—you guessed it—food. But let me first thank in 1936, its Chicago office staff alone included Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Hazal Çorak who alerted me to what you are about to read. Jack Conroy, Katherine Dunham, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, and Rich- ard Wright—a veritable who’s who of youthful Chicago artists who would On a cold February afternoon in 1947, Nelson Algren, then on the cusp of a soon be propelled to national and international renown. A major focus of their literary breakthrough, took the El to the Loop to meet Simone de Beauvoir work was the Illinois version of the 48 state guides the FWP was compiling, in the Palmer House Hilton’s Le Petit Café. On her first trip to America, de but other projects in which Algren was involved included “industrial folk- Beauvoir had encountered Algren’s long-time friend Richard Wright in New lore,” for which he interviewed barflies, gamblers, prostitutes, loan-sharks, York, and Wright and Mary Guggenheim (who made the contact) suggested drug dealers, boxers, addicts, petty criminals, and other characters in the bars, that she meet him once in Chicago. As is well known—indeed, the Reader pool halls, and brothels of “the sleaziest skid row district of Chicago” (as his carried a good story about it some years ago—it was the start of a passion- friend and FWP colleague Jack Conroy later recalled). Elements of these ate (but mostly long distance) love affair that lasted until a somewhat bitter interviews often found their way into Algren’s novels and short stories in vir- end in 1964. We also know that the evening of that February day in 1947, tually verbatim form—a poetic ethnography of the multi-ethnic, multi-racial de Beauvoir’s soon-to-be “beloved Chicago man” took her on A Walk on the underclass that had formed in cities like Chicago, the kind of “lumpen” that Wild Side through the Neon Wilderness of W. Madison Avenue (known as Algren, more so perhaps than any American author at the time, so success- Floptown since the 1920s) and to a number of serious dives: the kind that The fully strove to humanize—in their own language. But Algren also worked on Chicago School of Sociology had been studying ethnographically under the the Midwestern version of the FWP’s “America Eats” project, whose stated direction of Robert E. Park since the mid-1920s (resulting in such memorable goal was to “produce a series of regional guides describing immigration, set- ethnographic—now historical—documents on a Chicago that has ceased to tlement and customs as these factors related the universal language of food.” exist like Paul G. Cressey’s dissertation “The Taxi Dance Hall,” Paul C. P. The results, however, remained unpublished at the time. Siu’s on “The Chinese Laundry Man,” Frederick Thrasher’s The Gang, or Nels Anderson’s The Hobo). What we do not know is where and what Algren Fast forward to the 1970s. Algren whose literary fame had sadly faded by and de Beauvoir ate for dinner that evening. We can speculate on hearty then, was going through a rough patch and held a silent auction in his apart- Polish fare or the skimpy bar food that used to be offered for free to happy ment on Evergreen Street. As Chicago’s first genuine celebrity chef and friend hour drinking patrons. As de Beauvoir later recalled, afterwards they repaired to his “hovel without a bathroom or a refrigerator, alongside an alley full (Continued on p. 2) THE CHICAGO FOODCULTURA CLARION THE CHICAGO FOODCULTURA CLARION (continued from p.1) Día de los Muertos of Algren’s, Hungarian born Louis Szathmáry, recalled, he immediately spotted a typescript entitled “Am. Eats. Al- By Elizabeth Bec gren”, took a quick look at it, decided that he had to have it for his collection, and placed a winning bid (Szathmáry was a monomaniacal cook book collector whose vast library is now housed at the University of Iowa). Algren turned to him and said “Lou, are you crazy? You are bidding too much for that manuscript. The recipes in it are lousy. It was a govern- ment writers project. I did it because I needed the money.” After Szathmáry had taken a closer look, he had to agree: “I told him that some of them were easy to follow, others sketchy, and a few impossible: for instance, the Flemish booya—60 gallons, with 30 pounds of oxtail, 10 pounds of beef soup bones, 4 fat hens and half a bushel of tomatoes”. Algren laughed. “He said the book was his but the recipes HOME COOKING were not. He had collected them from various sources— By Daniel Simantob, housewives, farmers, sailors, tavern owners, greasy-spoon Maisie Watson and cooks—and wrote them down as best he could. He wished me luck in case I really wanted to do something with them.” Sophia Franzon Which Szathmáry eventually did. After having cooked and re-written most of the recipes, he published America Eats Día de los Muertos, a period of I wished to explore how spiri- in dimensions of modernity, such festivity and observance within tual connections were created as the industrialization of sugar. in the University of Iowa Press’s Iowa Szathmáry Culinary Latin America, is a reunion of the by altars. It wasn’t until my time The rise of consumerism, and Arts Series in 1992. living and the dead in service and observing that I recognized that thus poor eating habits, produce remembrance. Despite its origins I should be asking another ques- and commodify the new ofrenda. More a poetic evocation of waning rural foodlore written in pan-Roman Catholic dogma, tion as well: who was facilitating Traditional practices originating in New Deal populist style than an ethnography of the rap- in Mexico this holiday is cen- this connection with the dead? from pre-Columbian rituals are idly changing Midwestern foodways of the 1930s, America tered around the more folk and The altar makers, and precisely pushed into postmodern Chicago Eats nonetheless is a remarkable document of the diversity spiritual traditions of altar mak- the bearers of this knowledge, society, changing the nature of the of ingredients that were then about to merge into the chunky ing, the creative processes of dis- were women and young girls, ofrenda itself.

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